two-lined salamanders hide under rocks in
faster water, limited to a few feet of navigable
territory but with more insects to grab, tum
bling by.
At the pond, which I had dug a decade ago
(the best $110 I've ever spent), already four
kinds of frogs breed-green frogs, pickerel
frogs, gray tree frogs, and spring peepers. The
tree frogs in a June rainstorm will pipe up,
safe in their willows after leaving the breeding
pool, as if notifying one another where they
have ended up. Frog music, in fact, was why I
wanted the pond, and I've been careful not to
transplant any fish or turtles into it that might
eat the eggs. Toads lay eggs there as well, so
five kinds of watery songs now enliven the
spring dusk for me, not counting the wood
frogs' clucking calls, which briefly in April
resound from shallower, rain-fed temporary
pools. I worry about them because their voices
have noticeably thinned in the annual song
fest, and I come across fewer hopping through
the moss in my walks later on. Like the wan
dering wood turtles-also severely depleted
in recent years-you don't see them much
in my neck of the woods. Terrestrial turtles
everywhere are getting run over as roads
crosshatch the places they live. But with the
wood frogs, the prime disaster appears to be
acid rain; I've done pH tests on the evanescent
breeding pools that fill with the spring show
ers and found that they have become as acidic
as tomato juice, whereas the spring-fed, per
manent ponds where the other frogs breed are
still in the healthy range.
PEOPLE OVERLAP TOO. Summer folk pay
taxes on lots of land they vacate on
Labor Day, whereupon the guy living
in a double-wide trailer with a plywood exten
sion built onto it, near town, may come out
and make the place his own-collect the cider
apples, nail deer stands in the trees, cut balsam
boughs to twist into Christmas wreaths, lay
out a trapline for beaver, mink, and bobcat,
and run some bear hounds through and sell
the bear's gallbladder to Korean medicine men.
But after Memorial Day weekend, all seems
politically correct on the place again. The
defunct farm becomes a stage set for modern
morality plays: Repairing a marriage or start
ing afresh, recapitulating for one's children the
pleasures of sunfish fishing, flower pressing,
butterfly collecting, rabbit raising, or Orion
VERMONT: SUITE OF SEASONS